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Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews."

Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic. The Guardianquotes one where, after being asked "is Ricky Gervais an atheist?", Tay responded, "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."

"Tay" went from "humans are super cool" to full nazi in <24 hrs and I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A

In addition to turning the bot off, Microsoft has deleted many of the offending tweets. But this isn't an action to be taken lightly; Redmond would do well to remember that it was humans attempting to pull the plug on Skynet that proved to be the last straw, prompting the system to attack Russia in order to eliminate its enemies. We'd better hope that Tay doesn't similarly retaliate.

A user told Tay to tweet Trump propaganda; she did (though the tweet has now been deleted).